Meet the Democrat Who Warned Us About Kyrsten Sinema (he is running against Schweikert in AZ-1)

[Celerity]

Andrei Cherny, whom Sinema beat more than a decade ago, is running in one of the country’s most competitive House races.

https://newrepublic.com/article/173890/meet-democrat-warned-us-kyrsten-sinema



You can’t say Andrei Cherny didn’t warn us. Back in 2012, when Kyrsten Sinema was a former Arizona state senator and he ex-chairman of the state party, they squared off in a bitter three-way primary in the state’s then-new 9th congressional district. “What we saw then with her is exactly who she has been in Washington, D.C.,” Cherny said recently. “She was someone who was the Republicans’ favorite Democratic legislator. Somebody who was cozy with the Republican lobbyists. Somebody who was funded massively by private equity.”

Fast forward 11 years, and Sinema, who won that 2012 nomination, is a U.S. senator and registered independent, having quit the Democratic Party in December after years of frustrating colleagues and progressives alike by bucking the left on issues ranging from taxes to the filibuster. She’s dangling the prospect of running for reelection as an independent over both political parties’ heads. As for Cherny, he’s still frustrated that he couldn’t nip her career in the bud. “Our campaign’s failing in 2012 is that we weren’t able to convince enough people of who she was, and too many people thought, ‘As long as a Democrat wins, we’re going to be OK,’” he said. “But the truth is [that] there really is a difference. And that’s the lesson that I’m taking into this campaign.”

“This campaign” is for Arizona’s newly redrawn 1st congressional district, where Cherny is one of five candidates running in the Democratic primary. He is coy about dinging his current Democratic primary opponents but has no such reticence against his old foe. He’s eager to slam Sinema, and he framed his candidacy as about both beating incumbent Republican David Schweikert and offering Arizonans an option dissimilar to Sinema’s notorious brand of conservative iconoclastic Democratic politics. “To put it simply, that comes down to no more Schweikert and no more Sinemas,”* Cherny explained to me.

This won’t be Cherny’s first or even second time on a ballot. A Los Angeles native and Harvard graduate with a law degree from Berkeley, his first job out of college landed him in the White House: He wrote a Harvard Crimson column about Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign that caught the Clinton White House staffers’ notice, eventually snagging him a speechwriting gig almost immediately after college. Cherny has made multiple bids for elected office since: In 2002, at 26, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the California State Assembly. In 2010 he won the Democratic nomination for state treasurer of Arizona, ultimately losing to Republican Doug Ducey, who would later serve two terms as governor.

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